MATERIALS AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
According to Kiddle (2013), English language teachers have been adopting digital technology into their lessons for a long time. The use of technology in education went through different stages, from being “restricted”, “open” to “integrated” (Bax 2003: 2-20) based on how teachers and students interact with it. The current era, which is called Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in language education, can be perceived as “the border-crossing between the ages of Web 2.0 and Web 3.0” (Kiddle 2013: 189) where digital content will become more adaptive to users. With these recent changes, researchers have been investigating the way technology affects teaching and learning. For example, focusing on how teachers and students access information, Jenkins (2006) introduced the following “cultural competencies and social skills” which are necessary for the digital era: play, performance, simulation, appropriation, multitasking, collective intelligence, transmedia navigation, networking, and negotiation. Regarding the use of digital technology in teaching materials, Kiddle (2013: 192) pointed out that the use of technology in education has transformed the “creation of ‘materials’ […] to harnessing and exploitation of ‘tools’”.
The above idea seems to be related to Mishan and Timmis’s (2015) distinction between materials as “product/content” and materials as “processes/tasks”. “Content” means that materials are considered “as sources of information and data” and “process” means that materials are “frameworks within which learners can use their communicative abilities” (Reinders and White 2010: 59). I find this distinction very useful because it helps teachers avoid treating learning materials as a homogenous mass and instead make effort to look into the way they are using materials and to judge their effectiveness. Mishan and Timmis presented the following spectrum to illustrate the nature of each type of material:
The materials dimension, adapted from Mishan (2013: 217)
While it might be beneficial to compare different digital tools to under their characteristics, I think that identifying each type of material with a “static” or “dynamic” label is not the ideal way to unlock their full potential. “Static” materials like textbooks and websites can still be adapted in a way that makes them more flexible and applicable to task-based language teaching. On the other end, just using more “dynamic” tools like social networking sites cannot guarantee that the learning process will become more interactive or meaningful to students. Even though the authors have considered both the pros and cons of the new digital materials, analyzing these technologies in isolation may prevent them from being used creatively together with other materials. My argument is based on the fact that different teachers and students may possess different digital literacies. One of the digital literacies that Belshaw (2012) introduced was the ability to “remix”, which means leaners can exploit various tools with multiple functions at the same time to finish a task. He stressed that only when people “remix” different digital literacies can we move on from merely consuming the technologies. Back to the discussion of digital materials, if teachers rely only on a “static-dynamic” analysis and the availability of task types, they will jump from one application to the next without harnessing the true power of digital applications.
Thus, teachers need to create a set of principles for choosing digital materials to evaluate what they are using and decide how can they be used more effectively. For instance, Twiner et al. (2010, in Kiddle 2013: 193) listed the following three principles for digital language learning and teaching materials: multimodality, orchestration, and participation. In the next part, I will show my attempt at analysing the usability of some applications which can be used for language learning.
Apps for language learning
The apps I am going to look at are “Haiku Deck”, “Book Creator”, “Thinglink”, and “Explain Everything”. I will go through them one by one, explain their strengths and weaknesses, and suggest different ways to apply them in teaching in coordination with other apps.
Explain Everything
This app was the one I looked forward to the most because I have seen great reviews about it and some people compared Explain Everything to a portable interactive whiteboard (IWB). Considering I do not have access to an IWB in my school, this sounds really promising. However, I was a little bit disappointed when I finally saw for myself what the app looks like and how it works. This app is not much different from other types of drawing software – it offers users the ability to paint or write on a blank slate with the options of inserting images or videos on top. Still, Explain Everything includes one cool feature that helps it stand out from others: a screen-capturing tool within the app. Teachers and students can record what they do on the screen and annotate with voice audio at the same time. This gives teachers the opportunities to explain difficult language points or give more specific feedback much more easily. For students, they can use it to create story-telling videos. The only downside to this tool is that users have to pay for it. Thus, I think if teachers want to make use of only the screen-capturing function, they can search for other apps which offer the same feature. With a stand-alone app for screen-capturing, users can record not only what they do on Explain Everything but also other activities related to the tablet.
Thinglink
I have visited the website for Thinglink when I was looking at the use of AR a few weeks ago due to the fact that both AR apps and Thinglink can annotate on an image. However, Thinglink also offers the opportunities to annotate on videos or VR images. Still, the only drawback is that just a freemium account only allows for annotation of images. In order to use the app on videos and VR images, users have to pay for a premium account. Luckily, if someone wants to annotate a video, they can simply upload the video to Youtube and add any extra information they want onto the clip – web links, quotes, or polls. Thus, there is no point in using Thinglink at this stage.
Haiku Deck
This app is basically a simplified version of Microsoft PowerPoint. Personally, I often spend lots of time tinkering with PowerPoint slides to create cool effects or stunning visuals, so a watered-down presentation tool is absolutely not my choice. However, one problem I have noticed with PowerPoint is that some of my colleagues find it quite challenging to edit slides and they often complain about having to waste time preparing them. Similarly, when students work in a group to prepare a PowerPoint presentation, some might leave the work of designing the slides to only one member when the others complete other tasks. If a teacher wants the focus of a task to be on the content of the presentation instead of the visuals, Haiku Deck can be the answer because it cuts down the preparation time and limits the editing tools to only some basic functions.
Book Creator
Last but not least, I looked at the app Book Creator simply because I love reading and hope that the app can help me share that passion with my students. At first look, the interface of this app is quite user-friendly as it keeps everything simple. You can choose to use the app as a teacher so that you can create a library for all of your students to share. Sticking to the theme of a library, the app allows you to create books with covers and annotations in both written and oral forms on each page. Simple editing tools like speech bubbles or drawing pens are available for free. You can create books in different formatting styles – portrait, landscape, or square – with an infinite number of pages. One simple task that teacher can use with this app is to ask students to create a magazine using their own photos and stories. However, based on Twiner et al.’s (2010) principle of “participation” for digital materials, the app should also encourage students to collaborate with each other. Even though Book Creator offers real-time collaboration for creating books, users will have to pay for it. An alternative to this app could be using Google PowerPoint so that students from different locations can work on creating visuals and content at the same time.
Nonetheless, I tried using this app and created the following book:
https://app.bookcreator.com/library/-LAwQSogfYvw3bpvXei9
This book can be used with beginner classes to engage sutdents in a storytelling activity, in which they have to guess what will happen next. More creatively, the teacher can ask students to write their own alternative storylines based on the first few pages.
Conclusion
The use of technology in language teaching has given teachers many chances to modify and adapt learning materials. However, although technology is said to become an integral part of language teaching, I believe that teachers should not expect them to replace the preparation of teaching materials entirely. Based on a specific context, teachers will need to evaluate the use of different education applications or the availability of digital devices to meet the needs of all students. After all, with great opportunities come greater responsibilities – teachers and students who want to apply technologies into the classroom should learn how to use them, and not in isolation but in association with other types of technologies or types of materials.
References
Bax, S. (2003) Call – past, present and future. System 31(1): 13-28.
Belshaw, D. (2012) The essential elements of digital literacies: Doug Belshaw at TEDxWarwick. Available: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8yQPoTcZ78> [Accessed 30 April 2018].
Jenkins, H., 2007. Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century (Part One). Nordic Journal of Digital Literacy 2(01): 23-33.
Kiddle, T. (2013) Developing digital language learning materials. In: Tomlinson, B. (ed). Developing
Materials for Language Teaching. (2nd ed) London: Bloomsbury. pp.189-206.
Mishan, F. & Timmis, I. (2015) Materials Development for TESOL. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Twiner, A. Coffin, C., Littleton, K. & Witelock, D. (2010) Multimodality, orchestration and participation in the context of classroom use of the interactive whiteboard: a discussion. Technology, Pedagogy and Education 19(2): 211-23.